The Postwar Area Literature Group invites abstract submissions for our panels at the 2022 meeting of the American Literature Association. The conference will be held at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago on May 26-29, 2022. We will host two panels this year; please see the full CFPs below:

This seminar departs from the idea that we need a clearer understanding of elemental forms—traditional and non-traditional—that are in different stages of becoming formless (loss, disappearance, transmutation etc.). On the one hand, we build up on the critical genealogy of the formless (l’informe), a concept once popularized by Bataille in the surrealist journal Documents (1929-30) and later taken up by Bataille’s readers, most famously by Rosalind Krauss & Yves-Alain Bois (1997) and Georges Didi-Huberman (1995). While, on the other hand, we also welcome proposals that conceptualize the formless through different disciplinary vantage points and bring it to bear on the question of elemental forms.

As a sport, basketball follows a certain set of rules and conventions which serve as a framework for players, coaches, and teams to play the sport. By their very nature, these rules are meritocratic which means that all participants are equal on the court, play by the same rules, and the only relevant (read as: game deciding) factors are effort, skill, and fortune. Such a perspective on basketball and sports leads certain fans and observers to statements such as “politics should be kept out of sports”.

DEADLINE EXTENDED:

We are seeking chapters for an edited collection on the popular Canadian sitcom, Schitt’s Creek, which had a meteoric rise in the U.S. after airing on Netflix. Schitt’s Creek has been a cultural force with its catchphrases, meme-able moments, and Emmy awards. There is much to unpack to understand the show's popularity and its impact, and, in this edited book collection, we will focus on three central themes: love, place, and identity.

Underlying questions of the project include but are not limited to:

Tipping point: “the critical point in a situation, process, or system beyond which a significant and often unstoppable effect or change takes place.”  Merriam Webster.

Soap operas, wrestling, periodicals, reality television, comic books, literature, video game and film franchises, vlogging, sports, advertising campaigns, and now even politics and political journalism have harnessed the power and popularity of the serialized form to build and sustain audiences in our increasingly fractured media landscape.

This session seeks papers that attend to the affordances of infrastructure for aesthetics and of aesthetics for infrastructure in postcolonial/global South literature. We aim to explore infrastructure's own aesthetic capacities, the ways in which built forms and their materials produce specific aesthetic effects and social uses, or the ways in which infrastructure makes aesthetic perception available to social practice. In turn we are interested in the way aesthetic qualities like form, genre, reception, plot, narrative, or medium are themselves infrastructural and shape encounters with infrastructure.

Keynote speakers: Avtar Brah and Sophie Chao

Plus a reading from Leone Ross

Website: https://buildingbridgesntu.wordpress.com

The heterogenous character of protean form of travel writing—letters, journals, logbooks, diaries, memoir, journalistic pieces, guidebooks, confessional narratives, accounts of seafaring voyages, literary picaresque narratives, scientific explorations, artists’ escapades, ventures of urban flâneurs, self-exiled wanderers, and fiction—resists easy demarcation. Its heterogeneity lies in the revisionary stance brought about in each narrative through the distinguishing figure of the traveller, mode of narration, means of mapping, or redefining of the landscape.

The Mouse’s Monsters at PCA: Further Examples of Monsters and the Monstrous in the Worlds of Disney

Sponsored Session Proposed for the 2022 Virtual Conference of the Popular Culture Association

Sponsored by the Monsters & the Monstrous Area and the Disney Studies Areas of the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association for PCA’s Disney Studies Special Topic Area.

Virtual event: 13-16 April 2022.

Proposals are due by 21 January 2022.

A Critical Companion to Jane Campion 

Edited by Elsa Colombani and Eurydice Da Silva 

Part of the Critical Companion to Popular Directors series 

edited by Adam Barkman and Antonio Sanna 

Feeling, Form, Mind: A Conference on the Thought of Susanne K. Langer

An interdisciplinary conference by the Susanne K. Langer Circle in cooperation with the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

June 22–24, 2022

Susanne K. Langer (*1895; † 1985) is widely known for her contributions to a variety of fields ranging from the philosophy of art to mathematical logic. Her thought continues to be felt across diverse traditions, in theory as well as in artistic practice. 

When we think of the western literary canon, we tend to think of the famous authors and works that have shaped our literary and scholarly culture into what it is today: Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, Twain, Whitman, and the list goes on and on. But In our age of cultural and technological advancement, we believe that the bodies of works we consider worthy of study should also reflect the current world around us. Thus, the goal of this issue of The Humanities Review is to shine a spotlight on those authors, works, and platforms which have not yet found a home in the literary/academic canon, but still merit the kind of close literary analysis afforded to the canon.

Is it true that, according to a 2019 study, men are ‘officially funnier than women’?